An initial public offering (IPO) of the Trainline ticketing app is planned for June 2019 and the company hope to raise a minimum of £75mn from their shares. The US owners of this online ticketing business believe their company may be worth a total of £1.5bn. Trainline’s owners are a US equity firm, KKR, and they purchased the business for £500mn in 2015.
About The Trainline Share Offering
No price has yet been agreed for the shares in Trainline, however, it is anticipated this flotation will be one of the largest to take place in 2019. The company also owns a similar French business operation, Captain Train, which was acquired in 2016.
Trainline has ambitious plans for growth and expansion. At present only 39% of all rail tickets purchased in the largest European markets are online transactions. This is anticipated to grow tremendously, so Trainline will use this additional funding to expand their offering. Clare Gilmartin heads up Trainline and says the company will be hoping to benefit from UK government drives to increase the numbers of people travelling by train.
Trainline currently operates in London, Edinburgh and Paris, and employs over 600 people. The company sells rail tickets for 220 rail providers across 45 countries. The company is comfortably profitable, making over £10.5mn in the year to February 2019. This profit was based on rail ticket sales of £3.2bn.
Trainline originally launched in 1997 as part of the Virgin Rail group, and rail tickets were sold via the Virgin call centre.
Are Trainline Shares A Buy?
Trainline shares will be priced up over the next few weeks and investors can register interest in the share issue via UK brokers. The only other large business considering share issues in the uncertain UK financial markets of today is Watches of Switzerland.
One benefit to the Trainline share issue is that it’s a purely tech-driven business model, and the company understand their marketplace really well. Given the recent price drops following the Uber share issue (client insert link to your Uber blog post here) in the States, investors could be wary of how the Trainline shares will perform over the first few hours or days of trading. However, experts feel they could be well worth a punt.